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Transgenderism in Don Quixote

By Hebe Dotson

Subscribers can catch up with Part One | Part Two





A Gratuitous Tale of Sex and Violence

(Part 2, Chapter LX)

As the fifth transgendered episode of The Adventures of Don Quixote opens, the Don and his faithful Manchegan companion, Sancho Panza, have just become the prisoner-guests of Roque Guinart, a Robin Hood-like leader of a band of outlaws. They had barely made their host's acquaintance when a well-armed youth of about twenty rode up to them at a gallop. With no further ado, the youth introduced himself as Claudia Jeronima, the daughter of one of Roque's best friends.

Claudia told Roque that she had been courted by Don Vincente, the son of Roque's sworn enemy. She had agreed to marry him, but had then learned that he was to marry another that very morning. After disguising and arming herself, she had ridden out and found him with a group of his servants, just three miles from where she was now. She had given him no opportunity for explanations or pleas, but had shot him down on the spot and left him for dead. Now she wanted Roque to help her escape to France.

Roque decided that he and Claudia should go back and learn whether Don Vincente was indeed dead and then decide what to do. Don Quixote offered to force Vincente -- alive or dead -- to marry Claudia, but Roque left him behind.

Roque and Claudia discovered the dying Vincente surrounded by his servants. When she reproached Vincente for betraying her, he told her that she was his only love and that there was no truth to the story that he was about to marry another. As sad as these events were, he considered himself a fortunate man to be able to die in her arms, and with his last breath he took her as his wife. The distraught young widow decided to spend the rest of her life in a nunnery.

This tale is certainly gratuitous to the overall story of Don Quixote, since he is explicitly taken out of the action. The only point to the crossdressing is to give a young woman a disguise in which she could move around freely and unaccompanied, enabling her passion and hot-headedness to destroy two young lives. It may be that Cervantes, feeling himself near the end of his own life, decided to work all of his remaining fictional ideas -- appropriate or not -- into Don Quixote. The story of Claudia and Vincente may have been his outline for another novel -- with a few hundred pages of plot and character development, it might have been a good one, but it adds nothing to Don Quixote.



The Adventure of the Barbary Pirates

(Part 2, Chapters LXIII-LXV)

The last of the six transgendered adventures of Don Quixote is nearly the last of the Don's adventures as well -- little more would happen to him before he went back to his village, where his sanity returned to grace the last few weeks of his life. Actually, little happened to him in this episode, in which he and Sancho Panza were primarily observers of others' deeds.

The knight and his squire had made their way to Barcelona, where they became the guests of Don Antonio Moreno, a wealthy friend of the outlaw Roque Guinart. One afternoon they went to the waterfront to see the galleys and were welcomed aboard the flagship by the commodore. To give Don Quixote a taste of nautical life, the galleys undertook a brief voyage, which had barely begun when one of the lookouts spotted an Algerian pirate ship.

The galleys gave chase and soon caught up with the pirate. The Algerians were outclassed and outnumbered and by all rights should have surrendered, but two drunken pirates opened fire with their muskets and killed two members of the flagship's crew. At this, the angered commodore vowed to kill all of the pirates.

The Algerian vessel was soon captured and taken back to port, where the commodore decided to hang the pirate captain first. First, however, he had to identify the captain. A member of the pirate crew, a Spanish renegade, pointed to a handsome young man of twenty and said he was the pirate ship's master.

As the commodore struggled to understand why the pirates had chosen to fight, he was joined by the Viceroy of the city of Barcelona, who had come to the waterfront to witness the excitement. The Viceroy was touched by the pirate captain's youth, beauty, and gallantry and wished to save him from execution. He asked the captain whether he was a Turk, a Moor, or a renegade. None of the above, as it happened -- the youth identified himself as a Christian woman.

The captain's name was Anna Felix, and she was the daughter of wealthy Moorish parents -- but they were Christians, and so was she. Nevertheless, they had been caught up in the expulsion of Moors from Spain. Her father had gone off to find a new home for his family in another land, but in his absence, two of her uncles -- not believing her to be Christian -- had taken her into exile in Barbary (Algeria) with them. They were accompanied by Don Gregorio, the handsome son of a wealthy neighbor, who had fallen in love with her. He was familiar with the Moorish customs and language and was able to blend in easily.

Soon after Anna reached Algiers, the Moorish king learned of her beauty and possible wealth and sent for her. In an effort to evade the king's amorous attentions, she told him of jewels and gold that her father had hidden and that she could recover if she were taken back to Spain. While the king was interviewing her, he received word that an exceedingly handsome youth had come into exile with her. Anna knew that handsome young men were more highly prized than beautiful women among the Moors, and Don Gregorio was thus in greater danger from the king's erotic demands than she was. When the king asked her if this young man was as handsome as his informants claimed, she said that he was not a young man at all, but rather a woman in disguise. She would have her dressed properly and brought to the king the next day.

That night, Anna dressed Don Gregorio as a Moorish woman. When she brought him to the king, he was so impressed by this lovely maiden's beauty that he decided to give her to the Great Turk. Until the gift could be presented. she (Gregorio) would be placed in the house of some Moorish ladies of rank, since she might be the victim of jealous attacks if she were placed in the king's seraglio.

The king devised a plan for Anna to return to Spain to recover her father's hidden wealth. She would be accompanied by the Spanish renegade (who, she said, planned to stay in Spain) and a ship's crew of pirates. Instead of landing her immediately on the coast, however, the pirates had tried to undertake a little piracy -- and had been caught. Now she was a prisoner, dressed as a man and about to be hanged, while her lover -- dressed as a woman -- was in great peril in Algiers. (Note: nowhere in this tale is any reason -- logical or otherwise -- given for Anna to have been the pirate ship's captain.)

Anna's story was sufficient for the Viceroy, who pardoned her and restored her freedom. Her father emerged from the crowd and plot devices emerged from the woodwork. A new scheme was hatched, in which the Spanish renegade and a crew of Christian oarsmen would go back to Algiers to rescue Gregorio (the renegade knew exactly where to find him). Don Quixote volunteered to accomplish the rescue himself, and was assured that his services would be accepted if the original plan failed.

A few days later, the renegade and his crew sailed away. Other events transpired, including Don Quixote's defeat in combat by the Knight of the White Moon (a disguised friend of the Don's), who ordered him, as a condition of his surrender, to return to his home.

Before Don Quixote and Sancho Panza left Barcelona, the renegade and his crew returned from Algiers with Don Gregorio. Although Gregorio had been dressed as a woman at the time of his rescue, he had exchanged clothes during the voyage with a slave who had escaped with him. He rushed to Anna's side, and all appeared to be heading for a happy ending -- in Germany, where Anna's father had found a haven for his family. But we hear no more of them.

And In Conclusion...

The Adventures of Don Quixote encompasses half a dozen transgender tales. The first three are burlesques, featuring attempts (usually successful) to deceive or trick Quixote. The last three are serious stories in which Don Quixote is only a peripheral character, if that. Four of the stories involve young women disguised as handsome youths. In general, they have disguised themselves to be able to move about unnoticed and unmolested in a man's world. They have missions: to track down a lover, to save a lover, to see just a little bit of the world. Their disguises are generally successful, as are those of the three handsome youths who disguise themselves as beautiful maidens (in the second, fourth, and sixth stories). The older men who crossdress (in the first and third stories) are treated as comedy characters. It's apparent that they wouldn't have fooled anyone who wasn't either as deluded as Don Quixote or as willing to believe in enchantments as Sancho Panza. Passing was strictly a young man's game in Don Quixote. My unofficial tally is twenty-two crossdressed characters in the six tales I've summarized above, four FtM and eighteen MtF, including the thirteen bearded waiting-women in one of the jokes played on Don Quixote. Only one -- the young man who exchanged clothing with his sister in the fourth story -- appears to have crossdressed for pleasure. However, there is one other who interests me -- a character mentioned only once by Cervantes -- the rescued slave who exchanged clothes with the crossdressed Don Gregorio in the sixth story. He presumably returned to Spain with nothing but the dress on his back. I wonder what (s)he did next...
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Hebe Dotson would love to have your comments and criticisms -- you can e-mail her at hebedotson@tgforum.com.
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